


We'll Search For Tomorrow

by GwenethDies



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Amy is a BAMF, Child Abuse, Coming-of-age, Roger Peralta's A+ Parenting, Vampirism, also, an intense hatred of squirrels, i think i broke some unspoken rule about having holt and kevin adopt amy???, idk it's my fanfic and i'll cry if i want to, kids being kids, kinda slowburn, lots of birds, not really sure what I'm doing, title of my sex tape
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 10:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29965275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenethDies/pseuds/GwenethDies
Summary: She flinched at the sudden voice, different than the man who had helped her out of the pit, and wielded the book as if it were a weapon. She bared her (normal-looking) teeth at the new man with the combed hair and long pajamas.“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. My name is Kevin. My husband here, Raymond, told me of your situation. Of course, you are welcome to stay as long as you want,” he said.Slowly lowering the book, she cocked her head to the side. “You two talk really weird, you know that?”“I do not know that, but I acknowledge your thoughts,” the first man – Raymond said. “Now that you know our names, might we also know yours?”“Am – “ she began before she could stop herself. She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “Amy,” she settled on instead, and it was very fitting.Amelia died with her family.
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago, Kevin Cozner/Ray Holt, Rosa Diaz/Gina Linetti
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	We'll Search For Tomorrow

It was a warm May evening, the sun was low in the skies, Vincent Weinberger had just responded to her text, telling her that he didn’t like her back, and everything had very quickly gone to shit.

Not because of Vincent Weinberger – that was quite terrible, yes – but because Amelia stood up in the center of the clearing, covered in more blood than the old crime scene photos her Abuelo used to show her, staring down at the nine unmoving bodies that she once called _family_. See, she knew that going camping was a bad idea. But did anyone listen to her?

No. No, they did not, and she was the one bearing the consequences.

She slithered to the floor and rocked herself, because she wasn’t sure of what else to do. She didn’t remember much, but she did remember waking up, half-conscious, and seeing a young girl with shiny, big teeth at the front of her mouth. _“You’re like me,”_ she said, then cut her own hand with a knife and held it up to Amelia’s lips.

She didn’t remember drinking, just blacking out and waking up with a hunger in her stomach that hadn’t been there before.

And dammit, but the dried blood on her brother Matthew’s throat looked real enticing.

Like any other dehumanized, monstrous ten year-old, she hid. She hid and hid until her mama and papa smelled like Tio Pablo’s tuna pot pie, maybe even worse. The sun rose and it hid, just like her, over and over.

It wasn’t until she was dizzy every time she woke up that she left, not able to bring herself to lick the dried blood off of the sunbaked corpses of her brothers like some nasty, two-bit lowlife. She tried eating berries, but they made her gag, and she tried eating pinecones, but they were worse.

She’d watch the hummingbirds drink nectar from the flowers and the squirrels chew on acorns, mocking her. “Fuck,” she said to a squirrel once, just because it felt like nothing else could be said. It just looked at her and chomped happily down on its acorn, like a bitch.

She hoped it got eaten by a coyote.

Days had little meaning to her anymore as she wandered about and stewed in her own hunger. She was able to drink water, but only bits at a time before she got nauseous again. She knew what she had to eat – or rather, drink – but if she did that, she’d be a bad person, and she always said that the one thing she never wanted to be was bad.

That was why she preened before her teachers in grade school and jumped to aid anyone she saw struggling. It was why she had started learning a third language, French, just before turning eight. She thought real long and hard, but she was ten years old now, and even though it had in reality only been two weeks, it felt like it had been two years since she’d been around living people.

She couldn’t remember any French anymore.

It was hard to remember as days past, but she thought she used to like to draw. She would look at beautiful things and see that they were beautiful, but now she couldn’t even call the sunrises and the flowers remarkable.

Her days consisted of aimlessly hobbling and cursing god and whatever else she could think of. She was doubled over, clutching her stomach in agony, when the most delectable scent crossed her nose, and nothing had smelled quite so good in as long as she could remember, not even Mama’s famous stuffed turkey.

Her nose had a mind of its own, leading her like a lost puppy towards salvation – a shrew, bleeding out on the ground. It wasn’t the prettiest sight, but she figured she probably wasn’t, either.

“You’re like me,” she said for no reason in particular as she knelt beside the shrew. It was badly mangled, unable to move, but still breathing. She watched its flank heave with its shuddering breath and wondered if she looked like that, too, at some point.

The shrew was staring at her out of the corner of its eye, and she met its gaze guiltily, drinking in the delicious scent of its blood.

“It’s nothing personal,” she tried to assuage, as if it could even understand her. Hell, she could barely understand herself. Her voice was raspy and cracked every other word, her throat dry. “It’s just, my stomach hurts really badly, and I think you can help.”

There was so much fear in its eye, though, so much fear. She frowned and let her head fall forward because she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t strong enough. It was a little thing, no bigger than her hand, but she wasn’t a bad person.

She sat beside the shrew and stroked its flank, reveling in the soft feeling of its fur. It was matted with blood, but still the softest thing she’d felt in a while. “It’s okay. I’ll let you die on your terms. I’ll stay here with you, I promise.”

And she did. She sat beside the dying creature and bared her teeth at the coyote that once peeked curiously at them. She let it die, felt its body go stiff beneath her, and then like an animal, she lowered her face to it.

So close to blood, she felt her mouth change in a funny way. She had two sharp teeth, like the girl she might’ve hallucinated. Big and unnatural. She sank them into the shrew’s side and drank like a dehydrated rat. It was sour, and coppery, and disgusting, but it was so damn good, too.

And then she cried. She rocked back on her rear and she sobbed for the first time in weeks, the first time since the incident. She’d done it, and there were no takebacks.

She was a bad person.

‘Course, over time, she started to wonder if she really was a person at all. Those sharp things in her mouth that came out when she found a dead creature to salvage from didn’t seem all that persony to her, but she was only ten years old, anyway. Maybe the big, sharp things were a normal part of getting bigger.

That seemed far-fetched, though, because her brothers didn’t get sharp things in their mouth when they got bigger. She once hovered above a puddle of water that she was about to drink from and looked at her reflection, really looked at it for the first time since her family stopped moving and started baking.

Everyone had always said she looked like her mama, but she didn’t quite believe it until now. She had the same hollowness in her cheeks that her mama’s corpse had, the same emptiness in her eyes. The same hopelessness.

She reached down into the puddle and splashed at her reflection, ruining it. Good riddance.

Over time, she stopped wondering altogether.

She had a few small fights with wildlife, but none quite so frightening or devastating as the time she’d thought she’d made a friend.

He was brown and furry and had big teeth like her, and he was curious about her. She knew instantly that he was different. They played, rolled around, nipped at each other like her mama’s kitten would do with a toy. She felt more animal than anything else – couldn’t even remember the last time someone said her name – but it was kinda nice. It was kinda nice not being alone.

She saw her friend a few times, mostly played with him. It was far more enjoyable for him than it was for her.

But then she met his mama, and she wasn’t quite as nice as him.

She laid there, bleeding on the ground like her own mama, and weighed the consequences of trying to find her friend again. There were deep gouges all along her chest and a chunk taken out of her shoulder for good measure, and she _knew_ that these were wounds a normal person wouldn’t survive, but that she would. She didn’t know how, but she knew that there were few things that she wouldn’t survive.

It hurt even worse than her stomach most days, so she decided against trying to find her friend again. She gingerly picked herself up from the ground, letting the animal instinct take over, and crawled on her hands and knees towards a finch.

Feathers sure weren’t the tastiest thing, but the blood – fresh and warm and gooey – was her favorite meal. She vowed never to take a life, but bleeding out and weak from the mama bear, it was all she could do. She didn’t cry over the finch like she had her first meal.

In fact, she hadn’t cried since then.

There was some innate part of her, though, that insisted she had to right her wrong. She had to do something to make up for being a killer. She made a shallow grave for the finch and tucked his wings close to his body, to keep him warm in his eternal slumber.

She did for the finch what she couldn’t do for her family. She buried him, thanked him, and said goodbye.

Her shoulder didn’t heal up too badly, she thought. Of course, she wasn’t a doctor or anything, but it was eventually looking better after a whole lotta hurt.

It was ugly, but she was pretty sure she was, too, so it didn’t bother her all that much.

She wasn’t sure how many days she’d travelled since the incident, or how far she’d gotten, but by the time she fell down the hole into the seven foot deep pit, she knew that she was a bit too big for her raggedy old clothes and a bit too dead to care.

Her head hit the bottom hard and she groaned. She tried to sit up, but it was far too dizzying, so she remained decidedly on the bottom of the pit. She stared up at the sky, through the gap in the trees into the sun, and wondered if she were finally gonna die. If she were finally lucky enough to be like her family.

Maybe it was a hiccup that they went and she stayed, maybe she really had hallucinated the girl and this was the universe fixing the mistake.

But then something blocked the light of the sun, the light at the end of the long tunnel, and she groaned again.

“Hello? Are you physically injured?”

The voice was deep and calculated, and it took a few solid seconds for her to register its meaning. She hadn’t seen another person since the incident – purposefully, it must be added. She didn’t know how to talk to a person when she was so clearly something else, so she avoided them.

“I have a rope tied to a tree. I am coming down to get you.”

As the man who blocked her sun proceeded to do just that, she managed to scramble into an upright sitting position and slump against the wall of the pit. Her ankle was hurting, and so was her head, but all of her attention was focused on the tall, broad-shouldered man who she was backed into a corner by.

Her eyes flickered up, towards the sky, and then back at the man. She saw the rope tied around his waist, ascending up out of the pit.

“I do not wish to hurt you,” he said slowly, hands out in front of him placatingly. “Will you let me help you?”

Trembling, she rose to a stand, puffing out her chest as best as she could in a tactic she’d seen the coyotes do when faced with another predator. She glanced again between the rope and the man before making a break for it.

She managed to climb up him and launch off of his shoulder before he had time to react, scrambling to grasp the rope. She let out a small yelp as her hand slipped and she crashed back down onto the ground, suddenly in much closer proximity to the man than she’d like to be.

He reached out to touch her and she jerked away, darting back to the other side of the pit.

She licked her lips and swallowed hard, making a decision then and there. She opened her mouth to speak, but what came out was little more than a squeak.

For his part, the man stayed still, hands still out before him.

“Not afraid of you,” she managed hoarsely after clearing her throat several times.

One of his eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. “Yes, that is evident by your cowering,” he said, and while she didn’t remember every word she knew, she got the general idea. “Forgive me, I find that this situation has made me tense.”

“Then leave.”

She locked eyes with him, seeing something quite unreadable in those dark eyes of his. He lowered his head a bit. “If that is what you wish, I will do it. But may I help you out of this pit, at least?”

He sounded a bit like one of her schoolteachers. That was the only reason she agreed, she insisted. The only reason. Not because he seemed nice, or friendly, or in any way inviting, but because he reminded her of a simpler time.

She got out of the pit on her own while using his rope, not allowing him to touch her. It wasn’t necessarily because she feared him, but because she feared her own hunger. She never wanted to _eat_ one of her schoolteachers. Or, anyone reminding her of her schoolteachers.

“There. Would you like me to bandage your ankle? My home is not far from here,” he said once they were standing on normal ground again.

“No, you’ve done quite enough… sir,” she couldn’t help but add, slave to that archaic feeling of needing to please.

And he smiled, if the miniscule upturning of the corners of his lips constituted such a thing. “Here I was, thinking you were raised by wolves, but it seems that manners come out when most unexpected. Again, forgive me for my impropriety. I am delighted.”

She crossed her arms over her stomach and slouched a little. “I don’t know half those words,” she said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know words.”

“Well, clearly you know some words. You are talking to me, are you not?”

She opened her mouth to give a scathing retort, maybe use one of the no-no words that she’d taken liberty with for the first little bit of time after the incident, but faltered when she realized that there was really nothing good to say to that.

“That’s not fair, sir.”

“Come with me to my home. I would like to get you cleaned up, fed, rested, and in new clothes. Once that is completed, you are free to return to the woods as you please. It is getting cold.”

With every intention of saying no, she nodded and let herself be guided through the woods to a clearing with a shiny black car and the end of a road. She still wouldn’t let him touch her, no matter how much he wanted to steady her limping, threatening to hide if he touched her.

“I’m awful good at hiding,” she said to him.

She wouldn’t sit up in the front seat with him, that was far too close. Instead, she cowered in the back seat and tapped her too-long nails against the seat. She scratched them against the fabric and shivered.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe she should open the door and barrel roll out. Get back to safety, where she didn’t have to use her heavy tongue for much more than licking dried blood off of sunbaked corpses.

Instead, she calmed her fidgeting to the best of her abilities and tried to ignore the anxiety blossoming in her chest. She stared out the window and watched the woods pass by. It’d be awesome if she were able to run this fast. Maybe she’d run all the way to the edge of the world.

“I suppose you would not be amenable to staying the night at my home, would you?”

“Nope,” she said, popping the ‘p’.

“Do you have a home of your own to return to?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Any family?”

She clenched her jaw, feeling something real nasty building in her chest. “Sir, I’m gonna jump outta your car if you keep asking me questions like that.”

“I apologize.”

The car pulled into a clean, dusted driveway of a simple, two-story home. Even from the outside, it was nothing like the home her mama and papa had, where there was always chalk on the driveway and bird feeders outside and wind chimes hanging above the porch.

For what it was worth, the man didn’t pressure her anymore about herself. He politely opened her door and escorted her out of the car and towards the front door, ever-conscious about her ‘no touching’ policy.

He opened the door and let her step in at her own (slow) speed. She took in the beige color of the walls, the tile flooring, the polished bannister of the staircase.

“I have not yet spoken to my husband about your joining us tonight. Of course, I cannot force you to stay while I leave to speak to him, but I would like it if you stayed on the couch in my absence.”

“No promises,” she muttered under her breath, but took to the brown faux-leather reclining chair anyway. The man ascended the stairs and she watched him cautiously, still waiting for him to…

Well, she wasn’t sure. But he was gonna do _something_ dangerous. Like the mama bear.

She fiddled briefly with the simple brown throw pillow before arching her back and turning to look about the room with greater scrutiny. The colors remained neutral, even the spines of the books on the bookshelf lacking any sort of flair. She liked it, in a way. The organization, the cleanliness, it was calming. She scrambled out of the chair after remembering a small tidbit of information – _she liked books_. She was quick to grab one of the spines, holding it reverently as she returned to her spot on the chair.

She opened it up to a random page, placing her finger under a line with much ado. “Oh, the terr… terrible struggle that I have had ag… ag…” she attempted to read aloud. She frowned, examining all of the words that she didn’t know and wondering if she’d ever know them.

She didn’t like how they mocked her.

“Yes, that is the novel I would have chosen, as well. It is one of my favorites.”

She flinched at the sudden voice, different than the man who had helped her out of the pit, and wielded the book as if it were a weapon. She bared her (normal-looking) teeth at the new man with the combed hair and long pajamas.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. My name is Kevin. My husband here, Raymond, told me of your situation. Of course, you are welcome to stay as long as you want,” he said.

Slowly lowering the book, she cocked her head to the side. “You two talk really weird, you know that?”

“I do not know that, but I acknowledge your thoughts,” the first man – Raymond said. “Now that you know our names, might we also know yours?”

“Am – “ she began before she could stop herself. She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “Amy,” she settled on instead, and it was very fitting.

Amelia died with her family.

Raymond and Kevin were able to persuade her into a bath (or two or three, considering how much filth was really on her), spending the time while she was in there to drive out to the nearest clothing store and grab a couple of neutral outfits that would fit her.

After drying herself off and standing with the towel wrapped loosely around herself – she didn’t have a very good sense of modesty after so long in the woods – she appraised the two outfits critically with far more seriousness than the situation really acquired.

“This one. I’ll blend in more with the trees,” she said as she took the tan-colored shirt and long, dark jeans into her arms.

Raymond’s eyebrow twitched in synchronization with Kevin’s mouth, but if Amy noticed, she didn’t say anything.

“You don’t hafta keep looking at me like Imma kicked puppy,” she told Raymond matter-of-factly as she leaned against the doorway, watching him make the bed in the guest bedroom. She didn’t know how, but they managed to persuade her to spend _one_ night there.

Maybe it was because the bed seemed a lot nicer than sleeping in a tree. She’d fallen out of them one too many times to think it was cool or badass anymore.

She also happened to be very perceptive, and very good at picking up on the miniscule twitches of expression on both Raymond and Kevin’s faces.

“I only wish to help you,” he said as he settled the pillow delicately on top of the blanket. “I will freely admit that it pained me when you turned away dinner.”

“I don’t eat like you, sir.”

He made a low, noncommittal noise as he stepped back from the bed and gestured towards it. “I find myself concerned for you, is all,” he explained honestly as he watched her climb onto the bed and move the pillow about.

“That’s ‘cause you’re a good person, Raymond. But I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing that for a while now.”

“How long?”

She cocked her head to the side as she settled against her pillow, not allowing herself to revel in how comfortable it was quite yet. “Depends. What year is it?”

“1994. July 10th, 1994.”

Her nose scrunched up as she thought about it, trying her best to remember. She had learned some math before the camping trip gone wrong – she knew how to add and how to subtract, how to multiply and divide. She knew what a fraction was.

But she couldn’t remember her birthday – only her birthyear. She figured that was good enough.

“Two years, sir. I’m twelve years old.”

And it made her feel a bit better in a way she’d never expect. It made her feel like she was more than just some monster, like she could pretend to be human again. It was a fleeting fancy, and she knew that it was wrong to feel that way when she was a bad _thing_ , not even earning the position of ‘person’ after killing that finch.

But it was kinda nice.

And yeah, it was kinda nice when Raymond gave her that expression that looked like he was smiling but trying very clearly not to, the miniscule tightening of the corners of his lips betraying him.

“In the morning, we can feed you some breakfast and then talk about getting you back to the woods,” he promised her before leaving and shutting the door tightly behind him.

She wasn’t tired – she never was anymore – but she fell asleep with the thought in her mind that the bed was far too comfy for going back to sleeping in the trees to be a viable option.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holt: so i found this small child and i have comprised a comprehensive explanation of why we should adopt her
> 
> kevin: i’m listening


End file.
